Troubled Waters

by C. J. Cherryh

  Denny remembered a certain window, and a certain escapade which no longer seemed so clever, and the shadowy men on the canalside walkways, and shuddered. "Then it'll be quiet, m'ser. Real quiet. Babies wouldn't wake up."

  "And how long can I expect this sudden fit of virtue to last?" Mondragon asked, with heavy irony.

  "It'll last, m'ser, long as ye got use for me. Though happen—" Denny grinned suddenly, engagingly, turning on the charm he knew damned well he had in abundance. The only useful inheritance he had from his mother. "Happen ye'll have t' crack me over th' ear, now an' again. Rat used to—'bout once a week."

  Mondragon's eyes narrowed a little as he studied Denny. The boy held steady beneath that merciless gaze, neither dropping his own eyes, nor shifting so much as an inch. Finally Mondragon nodded in apparent satisfaction.

  "You'll do as I say? Exactly as I say? No arguments?"

  "Yes, m'ser. No arguments, m'ser. I c'n spot a professional when I see one, m'ser. Happen ye could teach me more'n a bit, ne? I learn quick, even Rif says so. One other thing, though—Raj, he went an' spent all th' rent money on yer medicine, an' both of us had t' take leaves t' help out here, so there ain't nothin' saved." Denny was not averse to rubbing that in, just to remind Mondragon that they'd already bankrupted themselves for him, and that debt could work both ways.

  He got a bit of satisfaction when this time he definitely saw Mondragon wince.

  "So we either gotta stay here, or hit th' air-shaft again. Happen th' air-shaft ain't no bad notion; ye gotta get over th' roof t' get in it—hard fer folks t' sneak up on ye."

  Mondragon shook his head ruefully, closing his eyes for a moment.

  "Mercy—" he mumbled, "—what have I let myself in for?"

  He cast a glance behind Denny. "Jones, you've got some stake in this too—"

  Denny didn't look around, but heard Jones flop down in a chair behind him.

  "Happen it's no bad idea," she said, "keepin' 'em here. Lots of comin's and goin's—maybe not all by doors—confuse th' hell outa watchers."

  Mondragon looked over at Denny again, and Denny had the peculiar feeling of seeing someone quite near his own age looking at him out of those adult eyes for one brief flash.

  "Hey, air-shaft ain't so bad," he gave a token protest. "I lived there three years. Better'n the swamp."

  "I'd rather you were where I could see you."

  Denny shrugged. "Well, ye want us t' stay, we stay. But we got jobs, we'll kick in."

  "Ye'd better." That was Jones, behind him.

  "Well then, Deneb Takahashi, I think we may have a bargain." Mondragon grinned unexpectedly. "Even if my bones tell me it may well be a partnership made in Hell."

  Denny just grinned right back. "Hey, not fer you, m'ser. But fer people actin' unfriendly-like? 'Gainst a team like the three of us, you, me, n' Jones, m'ser Tom? They ain't got a chance!"

  It was nearly sunset, and Raven had spent most of the afternoon in fruitless argument. Raven had been less than pleased with his convert's plans. He ranted at Wolfling until he was hoarse—but Wolfling had apparently been chewed out before this, and by experts; he simply held his peace until Raven ran out of words and then repeated his intentions.

  Wolfling had confessed that he had panicked at first, when he'd seen who was picking the boys up. He told Raven and May that he'd broken out of the knot of fighting crazies he'd engaged (who by then were so busy beating on each other they hardly noticed his absence) and struggled vainly to get to the skip before it could carry the boys off.

  But the skip's motor had coughed into life and carried the whole party back into the shadowed bowels of the city.

  Then (so he said, with glittering eyes), recollection had come to him, and he had edged past the brawl back into depths of the swamp, comforted by this new evidence of Jane's intervention. As he had told Raven earlier, Mondragon was former Sword; a man with an assassin's knowledge, a snake's cunning, an eel's ways, a duelist's defenses. As Wolfling saw it now, if the Sword was after the boys, what better protection could they have than that of the man who knew most about the ways the Sword operated, and from first-hand?

  But—Jane had charged him with watching over the boys—and Mondragon was only one man; he couldn't be everywhere at once, and he couldn't spend all his time awake. So. That meant that it was Jane's will that Wolfling should return to the city—

  "I'm goin' back in," Wolfling said simply, for the hundredth time. "Jane put it on me, the job's not done till She says. She said to watch the boys, so I'm watching' the boys."

  Raven sighed, finally conceding defeat. "Cain't argue wi' Her," he admitted reluctantiy. "But you got any notion where ye're goin'?"

  Wolfling nodded, slowly. "Know where Mondragon lives; know lots of watchin' holes around Petrescu."

  "Ye just contact them agents, if ye run inta trouble, hear? Rif—that's th' main one. Singer—"

  "—works outa Hoh's tavern, lives second floor Fife. You told me that already." Wolfling did not add what he had told Raven once before, though only once, and only when drugged—that he probably could teach this supposed agent more than a few things about covert work. The convert had little respect for female agents; according to him, most of them were damn little use out of bed. He was obviously itching to get out and moving—Raven had given him another drug; one that was meant to clear his mind, but which had apparently also fired his feeling of purpose to a near-obsession. It was pretty clear to Raven that every moment Wolfling spent dallying was only making the urge to get into place stronger.

  "All right, get movin'," Raven growled. "I kin see ye ain't got no more interest nor purpose out here."

  Wolfling did not wait to hear anything more.

  Perhaps he should have.

  "May," Raven said, looking after the way his convert had gone, "Get yer things. It's time we got back inta town."

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE PRISONER

  by Janet Morris

  Some drunken canalers were singing, "Sharrh light, sharrh bright/ first sharrh I see tonight/ wish I may, wish I might/ kill the sharrh I see tonight," when the dirty, dark stranger crossed Moghi's threshold, found himself an empty corner table, and ordered beer from the bar.

  Nobody took much notice of the stranger, not this winter's eve in Merovingen, in the wake of the todo last night, with so many people bleary-eyed from search and drink. There was risk in the air. The canals had gotten to stirring untimely; it was winter, when pickings were short, and Adventist, interventionist tempers ran a shade wild. Discreet, proper Revenantists put a proper distance between themselves and the singers, fearing Adventist Melancholy, Adventist cra-ziness. Bounty hunting was not beyond possibility, since Iosef Kalugin the governor had put a price worth a poleboat on the perpetrator of what the governor's office called a sharrist plot, and the Revenantist College of Cardinals had offered to match that price.

  The snow fell and melted on the boards outside, and neither sharrh nor sharrist crazy would step in a canal-rat's trap. People laid grandiose plans and discussed what odd things they had seen; they planned to become rich.

  Sharrh-hunting was not in Altair Jones' plans. She had other things besides strangers and strange lights in the sky to worry about—things like Thomas Mondragon, who stared mournfully at her over his whiskey. If the sharrh had really returned from the ends of the universe to blast Merovin to cinders for its sins, then how come, when the lights in the sky had come, no Retribution had followed?

  "They're chasin' willy-wisps," she said to Mondragon, who was curing a headache the hard way, the way he had tried it that afternoon, and come, still fuzzed, to Moghi's where, as Mondragon put it, he had good credit. "So're you, dammit. How much'd ye spend? Do I got to ask Moghi?"

  "Two hundred."

  "Silver?"

  "Gold."

  Jones' mouth was open. She shut it. And took a drink herself. You could buy high town lives for that. She shook her head in shock and said: "Where'd ye get it, Mondragon?"

&nbs
p; "I told you I wasn't hurting for money. You wouldn't believe me. It's nothing, Jones. Tell those damn kids they don't pay me back, there's no way they can pay me back—"

  "Nor me!" Jones snapped, short of temper. "Two hunnert, f Lord's sake—" "It's nothing!"

  She felt sick at her stomach. Rage at Moghi. A desire to break Raj Tai's neck. The understanding, finally, that when she talked about doing a little smuggling to help out the expenses—

  —it was damn useless. She was. Measured against that, herself and her skip and everything she owned or ever hoped to earn on the water in her whole life—

  A lump swelled up in her throat. "Well, maybe then you better pay them boys back. They give ye medicines, they spent themselves poor f ye. Like me. Ye owe me a bit, too."

  "All right. How much?"

  "Your damn neck!" She couldn't stand him when he was like this. She wanted to throw something at him, so she threw the taunt.

  Jones didn't understand all the intricacies of Mondragon's dealings with his patrons, the Boregys, who were thick as thieves with Merovingen's governor's third heir, Anastasi Kalugin. She didn't understand that any more than she understood the lights that had come from heaven and begun the sharrh-hunts and touched off the Melancholy on canalside and the religious revival on the upper tiers of the stilt-city. She didn't pretend to understand how Mondragon, this handsome aristocrat from Nev Hettek, had become involved with the revolutionary, outlawed Sword of God there, or with the Sword's agents here in Merovingen.

  But she understood Thomas Mondragon. He was a duelist. He was a gentleman, hightowner, a blueblood. He was an outcast, for all of that. He could never go home and that, too, Jones understood, having no home to speak of but her boat. She also understood that Mondragon had killed people, maybe a lot of people, back in Nev Hettek—and perhaps since he'd gotten here. That he'd become a traitor in the eyes of the Sword. That he was bound up in the political gaming between Karl Fon, once secret leader of the Sword of God, now respectable governor of Nev Hettek, and Merovingen's aging Iosef Kalugin.

  And she understood that Mondragon got his money that way, and that he got a lot of it, but, damn, that much—nobody could come by honest, nor anything like it. Nobody could imagine money like that.

  It's nothing.

  Hell!

  "Well," she said, "maybe I should take to huntin' th' sharrh, tie one up with bows and all and give 'im t' the governor. Maybe I should try some other line o' work, so's I c'n buy ser Mondragon a drink now 'n again, huh? ser hightowner."

  "Hush, Jones, keep it down, for God's sake—"

  "What ye done f money like that? Huh?"

  "Jones, you're drunk! Shut it up!"

  "I ain't drunk." She stood up and her chair squealed back under her legs. "Don't you call me drunk! See these hands? I got blisters, I got blisters all over town after that damn boy, an' you sittin' here, nice as you please. I ache, an' the' whiskey's got me warm, which is th' cure I got, I hurt so much I could curl up an' die, curin' your damn mess, and you don't tell me shut up, you don't take that tone with me t'night—"

  "Jones—"

  The rickety chair went all the way over as she stalked blindly away from Mondragon and their table, toward the door and the wintry night. Moghi's wasn't a place he should be chasing her out of; Moghi was her boss, her livelihood—except Mondragon threw money like that at him. Yes! m'ser!

  She went, fast as she could, her back straight and her heels hitting the floor boards hard. Drunk, hell. She didn't look around, not to the right or the left or behind her. She couldn't risk another glance at Mondragon, or she was going to put her fist into Mondragon's pale, cold face.

  Damn 'im!

  - She wove at the doorway, her vision swimming. She hoped Moghi and Jep hadn't heard Mondragon treat her like some beggar child. She hoped no one had. Out the door, between the two piles of salt that protected Moghi's threshold this winter. She almost kicked one over. Little piles, no taller than her index finger, carefully poured just where the door shut.

  Everybody was getting crazy, since the sharrh had come. If they had. Nobody'd found a sharrh, or been found by one. There'd been no cleansing fire, no alien presence, no mutilated corpses—except those of the unfortunate lizards and swamp swimmers that folk had dragged in harborside, to show to the priests—

  But although nobody knew what the alien sharrh looked like, anybody with a lick of sense knew they wouldn't be paddling around in the swamp or holed up in some burrow. They were the sharrh, who had reduced Merovin to a techless, isolated ball in an endless night, afraid to rebuild its communications and defenses, afraid of electrics, even—because the sharrh had blasted the world and gone away, not occupying it, evidently content that the world stay vacant; and if people on Merovin lit large lights and looked like heavy industry to alien eyes, then the sharrh might come back—and this time there wouldn't be any people left when they'd gone.

  So if the colored lights shooting across the night sky last month had been sharrh, then how come nothing was destroyed? How come the Kalugins had put prices on the heads of sharrists? How come Cardinal Ito Boregy had held special services directly after, and demanded special donations? If the sharrh were really here, then no amount of "donations" from the faithful was going to make them go away.

  And, come to think, how come the census-taking was still going on like nothing at all had happened? "Hrmph," she said to the night, down the steps now and headed for canalside, where her poleboat was tied up in the dark of three-tiered Fishmarket Bridge.

  She didn't think much about the footsteps behind her, until she headed down the stone part of the walks. Then she started telling herself, Well, maybe it's Mondragon, come to apologize. But then, maybe it was Mondragon, just taking the long way home. He was still living at Petrescu, though he'd never take the shortest way home, like anyone else. Not Fishmarket Bridge or Little Ventani Bridge, no; Thomas Mondragon would cut all the way around by Hanging Bridge, where the Angel Michael's statue was, where the Sword of Retribution was still only partly drawn.

  So she didn't turn around, or give any sign that she'd noticed the footsteps. Could be just regular traffic, too. Jones wasn't the only one who'd tied up at Fishmarket tonight. She was beginning to regret that she had, as the cold wind bit her. She could have come in closer, but she was still trying to do things Mondragon's way—don't fall into routine; don't be too obvious; do everything a little strange—you want to go here, go there first; you want to hide, do it in plain sight.

  Jones was almost ready to turn around and wait for him to come up to her and apologize. She was slowing down to make it easier for him. She was considering how hard it'd be for him, that apology, and how maybe she should throw herself into his arms and make it easy for them both. . . .

  She heard the footsteps coming closer, as she slowed. She was figuring what she'd say and what she wouldn't, how she'd be content with a hug and a kiss and no wordy apology. Words between them were always risky. She'd just let her man say what he wanted, keep his pride—

  The footsteps behind her came faster, not slower. Maybe it wasn't him at all, just a stranger who'd go on by. . . .

  A hand came down over her mouth and nose and there was some foul-smelling rag in that hand. She couldn't breathe. She started to struggle. She got her nails into the arm around her arms, that single arm pinning hers to her side.

  Jones tried to bite the hand through the cloth, but the cloth was getting bigger and bigger and wrapping her all over and she was losing any sense of where her body was, or even if there was ground under her feet.

  She hardly knew it when she stopped struggling and slumped against the man dragging her toward a boat made fast against the pilings of the pier. She barely felt it as the man hoisted her onto his shoulders in a fireman's carry and started climbing among the slippery bridge-supports. She didn't feel it at all when, overbalanced, he let her go and she fell three feet onto some sacks stacked on the runabout.

  She didn't hear the thud as the man follo
wed, or the cough of the little engine as it started, or a voice with a foreign accent calling, " 'Ware; 'ware."

  Jones, sprawled on grain sacks and covered with a moldy blanket her captor had tied there, was dreaming that Mondragon had caught up with her on the walk, and they were back at his place, making amends the way they always did. . . .

  Chance Magruder still couldn't believe his luck as he headed his runabout and his captive toward Megary, the slaver's stronghold.

  But then, Magruder didn't believe in luck, other than the luck he could make. Magruder was Nev Hettek's Ambassador to Merovingen, Minister of Trade and Tariffs from Karl Fon's revolutionary Nev Hettek government to this Kalugin-ridden pesthole of a city. He was also a Nev Hetteker spy, the chief tactical officer in Merovingen of the Sword of God. And the Sword had a bastion in Megary, as well as a handy way to get rid of unwanted privy parties. This woman, Jones, a confederate of Mondragon's, was bound to be of some use, living or dead.

  Either Jones would know the answers to the questions he needed to ask somebody, or the economical act of taking her captive would provide the answers to other, equally pressing questions, such as whether the Megary Sword could be trusted, and where their loyalties lay; and who would come looking for her. Should worse come to worse, Magruder could cut Jones' throat, throw her in a handy canal, and see who did the mourning and who did the blaming—and who was blamed. Or he could tell Megary to sell her and see what happened.

  It was a decent night's work, even if she wasn't in Mondragon's business up to her filthy Merovingian neck. He'd watched them together in Moghi's, and if there was a good time to separate this pair and ask questions, this was surely it. It didn't take an expert to see that the two were disaffected with one another, that Mondragon was showing plenty of strain, and that the young woman was ripe for just the sort of maneuver Magruder had in mind.

  No, it didn't take an expert, but Magruder was one, nevertheless. And he was, as much as he could ever be, desperate. Magruder had an agent in Merovingen who was at terrible risk, and he intended to protect that agent, one Mike Chamoun, at all costs.